Im not going to trust a Meta company that they have "the data" on video being the hot thing all the users crave with a ten foot pole lmao. Fool me once with that bullshit
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Instagram decided it does not want to be Instagram anymore
- Thread starter Infinity Times Two
- Start date
yeah but there is a pretty big difference between resetera and reddit and things like facebook/Instagram/tik tok. not sure if youre going for a "gotcha" but pretty silly if so.
This is a good point. Facebook ushered in monetization in a way that no social media platform before it managed to.
I've recently returned to Flickr in a big way, after being away from the platform for years due, largely, to IG.
I wish Flickr were in a better position to capitalize, because I love everything about the latest version of their app and how they treat photos.
If they want to be TikTok so god damned bad they can start by having an actual iPad app like TikTok does.
Generally when people bemoan "social media" they are specifically referring to algorithm guided, attention monitoring apps not any website you can communicate with other people.
It seems like change for the sake of change mostly. I don't think they've made one change since I've been using it that made me think ' ah that's much better'
Basically the pained look of my avatar is how I must look scrolling through what Meta presents me with now.
My feed has been "post from someone I actually follow, sponsored post, suggested post, sponsored post, post from someone I actually follow, two suggested posts in a row" and then it repeats like that. Are you telling me it's gonna get worse?
Yeah, it's going to get even more video centric. Though most of the changes have been gradually rolled out over the past year.
Yeah I dunno what the problem is. They've gone out of their way to not have one.
Message boards are one of the last bastions of online chat that isn't governed by algorithms and sponsored content
Even Reddit is infested with this shit now
I'm really hoping that some sort of mass repopulate the forums day takes off.
People take a break from the big apps for 24 hours and try to revitalise remaining forums with low traffic.
I'll be honest, 90% of the time I used instagram its to check peoples reels, I barely even scroll through the feed anymore.
I follow an influencer who did a poll on this probably a year ago, she was wondering why engagement was so low on her photo posts and the poll results showed ~80% of people prefer to check the reel over the posts.
So I wouldn't be surprised if Instagram was just updating their UI to cater to what the audience is actually using Instagram for.
I think it fills a different void than TikTok which is primarily puts random videos in your feed. I know its creeping into tik tok territory with the random reels but
with instagram I can tailor exactly which reels I see and choose to engage with them or not and if there is nothing exciting I can just close the app.
I follow an influencer who did a poll on this probably a year ago, she was wondering why engagement was so low on her photo posts and the poll results showed ~80% of people prefer to check the reel over the posts.
So I wouldn't be surprised if Instagram was just updating their UI to cater to what the audience is actually using Instagram for.
I think it fills a different void than TikTok which is primarily puts random videos in your feed. I know its creeping into tik tok territory with the random reels but
with instagram I can tailor exactly which reels I see and choose to engage with them or not and if there is nothing exciting I can just close the app.
Yeah, realistically this is me too. When I'm on instagram it's 95% to just check Stories. I think I've posted to my feed two or three times in the past year
My guess is:
People: We want to see more photos of our friends.
Data: People actually want more short vids
Meta: No.
Instagram has gone down the toilet. Has been the only social media I use after cutting out FB 2 years ago (and by that I mean follow a select few friends to see pictures). I now check it once a week or so and literally every other post is an ad or a suggested post from some rando account I have zero interest in following or interacting with. Absolute dogshit platform now.
I totally want more videos of random people thirsty for attention doing skits that were cringe in the camcorder days.
I mean, he sells it well, but no, these changes are definitely not helping small creators, they're destroying them.
Unless, by small creators, he means douchebags making algorithmically successful content.
Use the trending songs or do the trending dances or follow the trending comedic formulas and bam you win!
Do anything interesting or unique or creative or interesting [that doesn't follow any of the algorithmic trends], you get nothing.
Yep. I have an exhibition coming up at the end of this year and it's getting me down. I will do some work in progress videos, but with video, it is harder to compete against the polish of the more "influencer" artists.
I also think it must suck for most smaller real-world businesses. Photographs are easy to take and a small business could have a fairy polished and viable social media presence. To project a similar brand identity with videos is more difficult, to the point where it might just not be worth the effort involved.
As a small business owner [multi-brand high fashion retailer] - this change is becoming SUPER difficult to navigate.
When dealing with 20+ different designers, it's nigh on impossible to create video content to promote each one, and every delivery from every designer.
It's asking for resources we simply don't have.
Plus videos don't always make sense for promoting this sort of stuff.
I'm transitioning to reels as much as possible, but I literally don't have the financial or biological resources to keep up with it.
If Meta is successful in lobbying the government to ban or cripple TikTok, then this is a shrewd move to make them the default life raft of all the people that are going to have to leave TikTok and find somewhere else to go.
If Meta cannot manage to do that, then they've ruined their own app for almost no gain.
Seems like a gamble hinging on that one outcome to me.
If Meta cannot manage to do that, then they've ruined their own app for almost no gain.
Seems like a gamble hinging on that one outcome to me.
Who cares what the data says when 50% of users are bots.
Most actual humans I know have drastically reduced their Insta useage because every update makes it worse. Even when a post gets "engagement" so much of it is just spam.
Most actual humans I know have drastically reduced their Insta useage because every update makes it worse. Even when a post gets "engagement" so much of it is just spam.
Haven't even posted to my IG since 2018. Me and most of the people I follow just post on stories so this impacting my feed (cute animals, skits, and hot models) doesn't really bother me lol
I still do and so do others in the Hangout photography thread. I'm seeing a lot of posts today recommeding it to people, hopefully the userbase picks up.
The problem with all of these suggestions is that there are *way* better platforms than IG if I wanted to use short/long form videos for self promotion. And that's if I'm actually interested in videography in the first place...
As mentioned above, Flickr's social is terrible. Self-promotion and discovery are also hard too.
Suggested Posts have crept into FB now too. And worse, you can't snooze them for 30 days there like you can in IG.
Instagram has slowly morphed into a disaster to navigate over the years. Your main feed is mostly nothing but ads and promoted posts now so I get on there and scroll for a few minutes and see maybe two or three of my friends' posts. Rest is bullshit from other people I don't even follow.
If you don't like it, you're simply not their target audience anymore. They can't make as much of a profit off you anymore. It's honestly time for you to delete the app.
I mean you can spend 30 seconds on a video but 3 seconds on a photo. If you were creating an app, why WOULDN'T you want to make an app that has people more hooked on it than three competition?
I mean you can spend 30 seconds on a video but 3 seconds on a photo. If you were creating an app, why WOULDN'T you want to make an app that has people more hooked on it than three competition?
Even Kylie Jenner agrees!
I'd love to think someone with 360 million followers would be listened to. T_T
Posted as a story though, haha
Edit: I do think stories has been a reason why post of images has gone down a lot. You don't post a pic of your lunch in your feed anymore. I know I rarely post on my own profile, mostly stories.
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Their thinking on this is really telling. They are saying us they'd love to put more friends content on our feeds, but there's not enough friend content being produced...not even a glimmer of awareness to the idea that the feed shouldn't be a never ending scroll of content.
If you want to make any social media platform 'good' just remove never ending feeds.
If you want to make any social media platform 'good' just remove never ending feeds.
|I'm not on Instagram anymore, but before I left I stopped posting pictures because I would always get very few interactions on pictures as Instagram was probably not showing my pictures on followers' timelines. I would get several hundred more views in stories than if I posted a picture, never mind reactions and comments. So it is really Instagram's fault...
This pivot to video is just wild because I have my phone on mute pretty much 24/7. Probably very old man yells at cloud but for some reason the idea of scrolling non stop videos with sound constantly changing is jarring for me
This isn't just a simple UI change though, it's a functional change in how the social network worked and was used. It's basically like Digg 2.0
This isn't just a simple UI change though, it's a functional change in how the social network worked and was used. It's basically like Digg 2.0
I now make stories to advertise to my followers that I'm making a new post. I follow a few artists who do the same. I'm just a normal poster but it still seems like the only way to get eyes on a new static photo.
The problem is that fb chased "high-value user interaction time" at the expense of overall usability, and it permanently cut off their growth potential and now the platform is slowly dying. The start of the "maximizing profit" phase for instagram is similarly the beginning of the end.
This is something I don't understand:
Spending less time on a photo means you can see *more* photos in the same amount of time it would took you to watch a 30s video. Sure, with videos I will have the app opened longer, but I will eventually see less content.
With photos you just need a single glance to see if the stuff is relevant to your interests and decide whether you want to click on it or not. Believe it or not, this is how I ended up clicking, following and even buy stuff from profiles on Instagram that offered handmade toys, ornaments or art. Videos don't work like that. Usually I don't even bother launching videos because either I don't have time to watch them, I don't know whether it's worth it, or I can't/don't want to launch something that requires audio at the moment.
So how hard is it to implement a "my circle only" button and "everyone else" button? I'd figure when people are up to date on their friends and family they can click the other button to see what's going on based on their interests etc.
It's already there, you have to tap the arrow on the top left above the stories.
Huh. How come folks are complaining about random vids when they're trying to keep up to date with their social circles? Sorry I don't use any social media. Have a dormant fb account from 2005 to lurk old friends and twitter to just lurk news.
The problem is, they don't want photos with sunset or things. They want people. And videos with people are way more engaging than photos with people.
Wouldn't surprise me if it's because it's relatively well "hidden" at the top of the screen and people don't notice it. You don't get any ads or stuff from people you're not following forced into the Favourites feed, just posts from people you've added. You can't set it as the default feed like you can with the latest tweets one on Twitter though, and it doesn't show Stories at the top either.